SND Player v1.x is a specialized musicplayer for the 16/32bit Atari computers. SND Player can, as the name suggests, play
".snd" files. These are songs using the YM2149 synthesizer which is fitted to all 16/32 bit Ataris and most Atari clones.

The .snd fileformat is short for "SNDH" which is a unified header and calling method for all types of YM-chipmusic. It means
that one single player can replay most synth tunes without having a dozen of different players and calling methods.

So what is this "YM2149 synth" ? Well it is that lovely little chip which is producing the "blipp" and "blopp" sounds in the Ataris.
However, the Atari chipmusicans have always tried to push the chip further, beyond it's possibilities. Today, twenty years
after the ST was released, new techniques to make nicer sounds from the ST are still arriving, much thanks to the effors of
Frank Seemann (Tao/Cream), Frank Lautenbach (Dark Angel/Aura), gwEm and Damo.

Latest updates.

March 1, 2006:

The SNDH file archive previously hosted here is now gone.
The SNDH archive is reborn on this adress: http://sndh.atari.org/
Long live the new archive, it's _much_ improved.

To comply with the new long filename extension (.sndh) of the new SNDH archive
a patched SND Player has been made available. Unfortenly the SND Player sourcecode
is lost, and hence cannot be maintained any longer. The above patch was made in
a binary editor.. Anyway get SND Player v1.51 here.

April 5, 2005:

A little roundup again. Since the last update, just a few months ago things have been moving
on the YM-scene. First out was a new version of Musicmon to v2.1 (download here)
which added Syncbuzzer basses in a way never heared before. Some cool demo tunes are included with the tracker as well.

A bit later Grazey released the SNDH-Editor (download here)
which is a compelte program for fixing bad infos in SNDH files and to upgrade them
to the brand new SNDH v2.0 fileformat introduced by SNDH-Editor.

In addition to Musicmon 2.1,
the classic chiptracker by Big Alec was released in a new spiced up version by Damo / Reservoir Gods,
the new version can be downloaded here.

On the emulator
side, there are a couple of updates; Audio Overload
for Windows, Linux and MacOS X has been updated with claims of better YM emulation. Some quick tests
show that the engine is still very poor, perhaps they should try to build on the open source
SC68 like so many other? Speaking of SC68, a port of it has been made available to
PowerPC Amigas in an app called SC68Mui (download here).

Now, if this wasn't all, gwEm (aka Gareth Morris) has released a new monster tracker (download here)
called maxYMiser. This is a killer application that works similar to Fasttracker 2 on PC/DOS
machines.

January 4, 2005:

A short roundup of why this place has been so silent the last couple of years.

Well first up, the SNDH updates has been stalled, delayed and put on hold. The first
time becuase we wanted to replace all the register dump SNDH's with a new better replayer
and have those files sorted away from the rest. However, after Grazeys fab UMD music demo,
we realised that using the native tracks would be much better. So we threw away a few months
of work there. But all for the better cause!

After that, we started thinking of new SNDH tags, such as playtime. This is yet to
be finalized, but it should be done in a while. And here, Grazey decided to give up the
Grazeys Zak Hacks, and instead help working on the new generation SNDH collection. Yes you read correct,
the current collection will not be updated, a new, _much_ larger collection will be released
during this year if everything goes to plan. There is a tremendeous amount of work
to be done, so I wouldn't expect it the first half of the year. Grazey is however
working hard on it, including editing tools for SNDH-files. The next generation SNDH collection
will move to it's own site, and this place will be the centre for getting SNDH-playing tools instead.

Speaking of SNDH-playing tools, since 30 months ago when we last updated here, there has been
some advancements in this area. For example SC68 has begun supported SNDH without re-capsulating
into the SC68 container format. SC68 has then been ported to MacOS X so Mac users can now enjoy
SNDH files quite decently as well. Check the "Non-Atari platforms" link for a list
of SNDH players.

Lastly, gwEm has released SNDH tools for converting various tracker files into SNDH, you can
find that under downloads.

April 14, 2002:

Finally a songs archive update. It's a collection of the chiptunes
released in demos and games over the last year. Not much nostalgic things this time.

Among the highlights one can find the complete soundtrack from
Reservoir Gods hit-game 'Chuchu Rocket', music from Alive and UCM diskmags,
and a couple of unusual things: Chipmusic from Falcon productions. One tune
is from the unreleased 'Raiden' Falcon shoot'em up (sounds like the Jag version
but in chip!) and a song from Mind Design Alive Falcon intro.

Long time, no update to either SND Player or the SNDH-Archive. Work has been done to completely clean up
the archive, bugfix the YM-converted SNDH-files and of course to include the new songs ripped and released
during the year.

Ooops.. the short-name SNDH-archive released a few days
ago has been fixed. There were three folder-names which had
9+3 instead of 8+3 characters, and that gave st-zip the creeps.
Both the "all_sf.zip" and "snd06_sf.zip" archives are corrected.
Thanks to Nils Feske for reporting this error.

September 11, 2000:

New large SNDH-package upgrade available.
Lots of previously un-heard sid-conversions and many
old Mad Max files from the 80's.

August 19, 2000:

The small counter continued, no ticks for about 9 months so we're back to
Dec 1999 values.

August 18, 2000:

The page has changed host, you still reach it via http://sndplayer.atari.org/ though.

The page recoded to use PHP instead of JSP.

New Falcon utility added to the download section: "Iphigeny" - an excellent program for
configuring the complex Falcon soundsystem, ideal if you want to mix YM synth sound
with digital dma sound or set the matrix for adding DSP effects.